I’m just curious to know if just a few of us, or most of us, remain multiple distribution users even after installing a few to try them out?
I’ve been a multi-distro user since a few years after I started, so I have nearly 30 years of Linux experience, and between years 5 and 6, I developed strategies to run multiple distributions from one system. I’ve tried VMs, I’ve tried using multiple computers and I still have a few examples of each, but for me, simply having multiple distribution on my main systems is what I prefer.
Out of 5-6 systems, three of them are definitely full time multi-distro systems; the other ones are older test systems, which I don’t mind overwriting whenever I want to test something different.
We’ve talked about this a bit, but I was hoping to devote a specific topic to this, so those who want to do so can respond and those who aren’t interested don’t have to answer.
I don’t care if we go down a few “rabbit holes” here either, as long as it winds back around to why we prefer to run multiple systems from the same hardware. In my case, I feel virtual systems lag in comparison to direct installations, though the differences are not as great as they once were; the more powerful the hardware, the less it matters, yet to me I still feel the difference and I don’t run any systems with as much power as servers, who can run virtual machines without “blinking”!
I use VM’s to run multiple distros. Currently I have 4 VMs, Debian 13(Trixie), Kali, FreeBSD, and CentOS 10 (I think it’s actually called CentOS Stream, but I’ve been wrong before.). So I’m sort of a multidistro user, I just don’t boot into each of them through GRUB.
@MarshallJFlinkman I like the “combination” of using a real iron (directly bootable) solution and a QEMU-KWM (virtualization) solution. That makes a lot of sense, and that’s what I’ve done at times in the past when I really didn’t intend to KEEP various distributions or variations, but I wanted to at least “check them out”. It looks like that may be what you are doing too. Great combination!
Actually, I use virtualization for everything I can. I have three physical machines with QEMU-KVM:
SuperMicro X9SCM with Xeon E3 and 32 GiB RAM - This was my first purpose built QEMU-KVM server. Until recently, a virtual machine ran Windows 10 with AnyDVD HD and MakeMKV. That virtual machine was replaced with Linux Mint and MKV. This is the box where I read and write optical media. I like to isolate this because optical disc timeouts can cause some weird hangs.
SuperMicro X10SRA with Xeon E5 and 256 GiB RAM - This is my primary hypervisor used for my home ‘prod’ virtual machines, one per primary application:
Tor Relay (middle-node)
Tor client (general use, but separate into multiple instances for Stream Isolation)
Tor client (locked to US exit nodes) with Firefox (technically Arkenfox) for region specific Web sites
Privoxy (whitelisting for Windows 10; deprecated)
APT-Cacher-NG (caches all those “.deb” packages so that each one only has to be downloaded one time)
Pi-hole (DNS filtering)
pfSense Community Edition as the DNS server on my internal network (default drop egress filtering on the pfSense Plus firewall)
SuperMicro X10SRA with Xeon E5 and 256 GiB RAM - This is my secondary hypervisor used as my workstation and as a failover for the virtual machines on the X10SRA above.
I use virtualization for a combination of prod, testing, and troubleshooting.
One of the troubleshooting exercises was interesting. My ThinkPad T43 running Linux Mint (not LMDE at the time) failed to start the desktop environment following Update Manager. Reading syslog showed nothing useful for troubleshooting. I restored the most recent “duplicity” backup of the T43 into a QEMU-KVM virtual machine, verified that the restored operating system booted correctly, and took a QEMU snapshot. At this point, I could rapidly test various combinations of updates to determine which one broke the T43. I finally narrowed it down to a regression with LightDM, found a forum where folks recently described the issue and how to fix it. I tested the fix in the virtual machine, and then I applied the same fix on the T43, correcting the issue. The ability to instantly revert to QEMU snapshots and retest saved me days of tedious restores and troubleshooting.
I have been a virtualization fan since 2001 when I was introduced to VMware ESX Server at work.
I’ve tried several distros, but decided that LMDE is best for me because it is Mint, but without the Ubuntu components.
I check out Mint & LMDE in VM’s but I stick to LMDE on my main machine.
However, I always run a LMDE VM on my LMDE PC to practice any major upgrades for LMDE.
Probably this is excessively cautious.